Recent efforts have been made to automate or semi-automate farming operations. Such efforts serve not only to reduce operating costs but also improve working conditions for operators and reduce operator error, enabling gains in operational efficiency and yield. For instance, agricultural machines may employ an auto-guidance system to reduce operator fatigue and costs. Auto-guidance systems enable traversal through a field based on waylines, which dictate a path the mobile machine is to take. Waylines are projected left and right based on implement width, enabling the mobile machine to cover the area of the field being worked.
When an operator wishes to use an auto-guidance feature today, the typical procedure is for the operator to navigate a mobile machine over an initial path (whether it is a straight A-B wayline, a contour, etc.) and then the system generates successive waylines based on the width of a coupled implement. Waylines are generated with starting and ending points, though an operator is often faced with extending the waylines given the geometry of the area of the field to be worked or because of other factors such as unfamiliarity with the borders of the field. One approach to handling the need for extensions beyond the wayline is for the operator to terminate the auto-guidance function and manually navigate the mobile machine, though such an approach increases the burden on the operator and may prove to be an annoyance over time. Another approach is adapted for straight A-B waylines, where the waylines are simply extended along a vector established for the original wayline. However, merely extending the wayline along the direction of a previous vector is insufficient for contour waylines, which by definition have curved paths.